Brooklyn Graduates To Reunite

April 28, 2000|By DWAYNE CAMPBELL Staff Writer

It was the year when All About Eve swept the Academy Awards and Nat "King" Cole crooned Mona Lisa from the radio. In Brooklyn, N.Y., many people who didn't have TV sets would gather outside Bresner's appliance store, to watch Milton Berle's Texaco Star Theater on Tuesday nights.

And in a bustling working-class Brooklyn neighborhood, about 700 graduates were handed diplomas. Their years at Thomas Jefferson High School had come to a close.

It was 1950.

With their diplomas, many would leave the neighborhood. Jobs, college and the Korean War would force them to abandon their prized street corners. As they moved on, the old telephone in the candy store became increasingly silent.

The rapidly changing technology would help bring them together in South Florida 50 years later.

After dozens of phone calls, faxes and unending e-mails, about 250 people from the old group will come together Saturday in Fort Lauderdale for a grand reunion.

"I've been out of school for 50 years, and I didn't know what happened to my friends. I really wanted to find these people," said Doris Nemeroff, 67, of Tamarac. Many will recall that her family had the first television on the block.

The reunion, to be at the Ramada Plaza Beach Resort, was Nemeroff's idea. Since she had moved to Tamarac, she often thought about reconnecting with her Thomas Jefferson friends.

It turned out that many had moved to South Florida, some just around the corner. Some alumni estimate that more than 2,000 former Thomas Jefferson students live in Florida.

A newspaper notice calling for graduates elicited several responses. Those who knew sent e-mails to others. Some called the school to ask how others could be reached. Nemeroff wanted a small gathering but the word spread as far as Israel. There are now 30 people on the waiting list.

"We didn't expect so many people, and we want to keep it small so people can be close and get to talk to each other," said Max Blank, 67 and living in Lauderhill. "We want it to be not just a reunion but a celebration of those special years."

When he got word of the reunion, Blank offered to assist with the plans because he lived near Nemeroff. The planning group includes Eunice Spielman, a Delray Beach resident and 1954 graduate of the school.

Nemeroff and Blank still have their Aurora yearbooks.

Nemeroff wears spectacles, a cozy smile and short blond hair. She used a finger, with a nail painted pink, to point to her Aurora reflection.

"Blonds are pretty, can't be beat. And here's one that extra sweet," the caption reads. She was Doris Tanner then.

A few pages earlier, a note next to Blank's boyhood photo showed shades of the comedian he would become: "Maxie starts a gale of laughter but hates to see what's coming after." He was Maxwell Blank then.

"This is not about how people look now or how successful they have become," Blank said. "Some people were cheerleaders in high school and they don't look that way now. Some haven't fulfilled their goals, but the reunion is to celebrate the time when we grew up."

They won't look the same. But the time they shared will be more important than who became a doctor and who never went beyond high school.

They will share photos of children and grandchildren and trade postal and electronic addresses.

They will talk about full lives.

Blank will fill them in about the dozen or so movies in which he had small parts, such as a waiter in Goodbye, Columbus (1969) with Ali MacGraw and Richard Benjamin. What he calls his "biggest role" was in a film still unreleased, he said, because the film's owner lost the rights in a crap game.

Some stories will be about Blank's corner, Riverdale Avenue and Hinsdale Street, the place he left to go to the Korean War.

During the war, he said, the boys from different Brooklyn corners bonded. "It didn't matter which corner you came from. We were just glad you were from Brooklyn," he said.

Back in the United States, he stuck to entertainment most of the time. When he wasn't acting, he did impersonations on Sing It Again, Jan Murray's popular TV show. Other times he was performing comedy routines in Manhattan and upstate New York, where he met his wife, Beverly.

She graduated in 1952 as Beverly Lieberman. The couple's two adult sons and their families live in Tampa and Weston.

Nemeroff's family had a car, and she had a closet of poodle skirts; she thought she was rich. In 1953, she took a schoolmate for a spouse and married Edward Nemeroff, a 1944 graduate. They moved almost immediately to Austria because Edward Nemeroff was in the Army. The couple's daughter Robbin was born there.

Upon returning to the United States, the Nemeroffs moved back to the Brooklyn neighborhood before settling in Long Island to raise Robbin and her sister, Shari. The move to Tamarac came in 1989.

"I couldn't believe how many people went to my school, then moved to Florida," Doris Nemeroff said.

She is still getting calls from former graduates. Some say they used to live across the street from her. They even know her old corner -- Georgia and Hegeman avenues.

"That was such an innocent time," Nemeroff said. "I hear the school is doing well but the neighborhood has changed. I haven't been there in 25 years but I'd love to go back."

Dwayne Campbell can be reached at dcampbell@sun-sentinel.com or 954-572-2004.